


Garden of Eden

by rallamajoop



Category: Guilty Gear
Genre: M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:57:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rallamajoop/pseuds/rallamajoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ky is not at all prepared to find himself running into a suspiciously familiar face in the early 21st century - to say nothing of finding himself in the 21st century to begin with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Because I do not want to get anyone's hopes up going in: this fic is a long-abandoned WIP, for which I posted one chapter back in 2010, and never managed to complete. The second 'chapter' actually consists an outline I recently threw together in response to a tumblr ask about the status of this fic, summarising what the rest of the plot _would_ have been, had I ever gotten that far. The third 'chapter' is a side-story connected to this fic, outlining Sol's POV of related events, written as a Christmas gift for a friend in 2010.
> 
> I mention this up front mostly because I'd hate for anyone to wind up clicking on the 'next chapter' button imagining there's more of this story to come than what they're actually going to find. Though I haven't marked this story as complete, it's almost certainly now as complete as it's ever going to be, and at the very least I can now promise it won't leave you hanging about the conclusion.

The one thing that didn't change in the transition was the sky – sullen and overcast, grey cloud padded thickly from horizon to horizon as though to keep humid stickiness of early summer from escaping. Flat on his back with a head full of fuzz, it took up all of Ky's view, and was one of the reasons it took him so long to realise anything had changed at all. 

On his first attempt to sit up and orient himself, the vertigo hit immediately. His head swam; his eyes insisted there were two of everything and he was seeing it through fog. He grimaced and levered himself up to lean forward over his knees, fighting the nausea that joined his other symptoms right on cue. He'd lived through enough concussions to know what _this_ meant. 

Gingerly, he ran his fingers over his scalp, trying to assess the damage, but apart from a persistent throbbing at his temples nothing hurt – no bumps, no bruises – nothing to suggest he was the victim of the least of head injuries. What had happened then, was he ill? Under the influence of a disorientation spell? He cast his mind back, trying to remember what he'd been doing. 

There'd been a tip-off about a smuggling ring that morning – tech so black even Zepp wouldn't touch it – and they'd responded without delay. The bust hadn't gone as smoothly as they'd have liked (though no worse than they'd realistically expected) – the smugglers had no qualms about opening fire on a unit of IPF officers. Somewhere in the confusion... Ky frowned as the memory trickled back – somewhere in the confusion, Axl Low had turned up, out of the blue, with a whole troop of smugglers in pursuit. There'd been no opportunity to wonder how he'd gotten himself involved; there hadn't even been time for Ky to get as far as expressing his surprise before Axl had all but run straight into him... and then there'd been a horribly dreamlike sensation of _falling_... and that was as far as his short-term memory went. 

If Axl _had_ knocked him down (and after the lifetime he'd led that thought was mortifying enough), that could explain a lot of his symptoms, though not why everyone had left him lying flat where he fell until he came back to himself. Or why he could no longer hear anything that suggested the battle that ought to be going on around him – no gunshots, no yelling, nothing at all beyond a vague background rumble. Or, now that he noticed it, the fact that he was lying on what appeared to be _well-cut grass_. 

Feeling not much illuminated by the results of his mental inventory, Ky looked up and made a second attempt to get his bearings. The dizziness was already clearing up, fast enough to cast even more doubt on the concussion, his eyes finally consenting to focus. It took some minutes for him to admit this, to stop blinking and squinting at his surroundings like a man trying to find the young girl in the black and white shapes that looked like an old woman, because it took him that long to convince himself he wasn't seeing things. 

Ky had woken to find himself in a small park – a rectangle of grass maybe half the size of a respectable block, crammed between two streets, a wall covered with colourful graffiti and another mostly obscured by the branches of three struggling trees, competing for space up against the masonry. Two park benches, faded blue paint beginning to peel, sat either side of a rubbish bin past due to be emptied. High rise buildings, reaching upwards dozens of stories of grey brick and glass, blocked the view more than a few dozen metres away in most directions, and provided an explanation for a number of darker blurs surrounding the edges of his vision of the sky when he'd first found himself lying here. 

Gone was the smugglers' hideout, masked in the decrepit ruin of what hadn't been a real city since the invasion of 2079. Gone was any sign of the smugglers, his own men, or even Axl Low. Gone was anything remotely familiar, or that gave Ky the slightest useful clue about his whereabouts. The architecture and the presence of a few medium-sized wheeled vehicles parked on the far side of the road put him in mind of some of the poorer areas of Zepp he'd seen through the windows of flying transport on the occasional visits, but he shelved the theory again just as quickly. There were few places anywhere on Zepp where you couldn't hear the distinctive hum of the vast engines that kept the island afloat, and the altitude alone assured it was never this warm there. Besides, how on earth could he have gotten there from so far away, let alone without anything more than a rapidly retreating headache to explain why he had no recollection of being moved at all?

He had to be missing something that would allow him to make sense of all this. But what? He'd never heard of magic that could achieve an effect like this. The only wildcards in play before his recollections ended were the cache of mysterious Blacktech the smugglers had been transporting, and the sudden appearance Axl Low. Could there be a Blacktech device capable of transporting a man long distances in an instant? He'd never heard of one, and the smugglers had wielded nothing more remarkable than ordinary handguns – the kind Ky was used to seeing carried by Zepp soldiers. That in itself was puzzling; the information they'd received suggested they'd obtained tech far more advanced than what he'd seen. Why just the handguns then, was the rest of the shipment too valuable to be risked? Unsuitable for short-range combat? Were even the smugglers themselves not sure how to use it? If they had gotten their hands on some kind of teleportation device, and if one of them had activated in the confusion without knowing how to use it correctly, that could explain Ky's predicament very neatly...

It still hinged on the existence of a kind of technology he'd never even heard of. And it was no help in explaining where he was, or how there could be any well-populated city left in the world he was at such a loss to identify. 

If the smugglers did have tech they didn't know how to use, that might well explain what Axl Low had been doing there. Ky's brief glimpse of him suggested he'd come from _inside_ the building, and he'd been missing the kusarigama he usually carried – enough to infer him to be a prisoner escaping in the confusion. It would explain a lot if the smugglers had heard of him, and determined him to be just who they needed to teach them how to get their hoard to work. Formidable as Axl was in combat, it was embarrassingly easy to imagine him being abducted while drugged or intoxicated – in which state the man was also known to forget the risks he took by reminiscing long and loudly about Blacktech creations that were no more than conventional technology in his youth. Ky had never been quite sure how far to believe his wild claims of spontaneous and involuntary timeslipping, but he only invited trouble by spreading the story so widely. 

Ky froze, the Blacktech theory all but forgotten in an instant. 

_Timeslipping. Axl_ , who'd been just about to run straight into him right before Ky had blacked out and woken to find himself in a city like none he'd ever seen before. 

For the first time since finding himself here, Ky began to panic. 

If he really was back in time – if Axl really had timeslipped right in the moment they'd collided, and Ky had been dragged back with him...

When Ky made his first dash out onto the street, it wasn't to find Axl or even to prove his theory right, but out of horrible need to find _anything_ that would prove such a mad idea wrong. The park sat on the corner of a T-junction – three directions providing too many new sights and sounds to process in twice the time and half the rush. Everything was wrong – the architecture, the layout of the streets, the vehicles – _cars_ , models even Zepp consigned to museums as artefacts of another age – everything down to the colours and the smell of the air. Ky picked a direction mostly at random and ran, jostling past one annoyed pedestrian in fashions from vanished centuries after another. 

He found what he was seeking only a lucky dozen paces from the corner park, in the form of a newspaper stand on the side of the street. Cover after cover, identical no matter what publication he looked at, placed the date in August, 2016. More than a hundred and fifty years in the past. 

Seconds turned into minutes as Ky stared blankly at the date, still trying with all his imagination to find any other way to interpret what he'd seen. 

"Don't get yer hopes up. Same shit they run every slow news week," said a voice. "Those cheap bastards used that same headline the week before last, but then they had, 'replacing gasoline' where they got 'cancer' now – and I'd bet five bucks that's as much as they did to the rest of the it."

Ky looked up into the face of the man running the newspaper stall – which was middle aged and weatherworn but not unfriendly – and realised that his wide-eyed surprise had been mistaken for interest in the cover story of the paper he'd been staring at. The headline read, ' "MAGIC" MAY BE WITHIN MONTHS OF CURING CANCER, SCIENTISTS SAY'. He blinked, struck with a second kind of culture shock in as many minutes. 

"Ah," he said indistinctly, at a loss for anything more articulate. 2016 was a mere six years after the discovery of magic, more than fifty years before the Holy War began, still nearly twenty before advances in magical technology would make possible the Bolstaff Scandal and the uprisings that would turn old technology into taboo Blacktech overnight. These were days when the idea that this new source of free, unlimited energy really could solve all the world's ills would have been very believable. Ky shook his head, not knowing what to think. It was like reciting events from legend – like a story from the bible. _Before_ the war. A hundred and fifty years might as well be a hundred thousand. 

The stall owner grinned at him. "Yeah, never thought I'd miss celebrity scandals until I saw 'magic' in scare quotes the third month running. Next it'll be 'solve world hunger' or 'make sick kids fart rainbows'. So you buying that or what?"

"I, ah, I'm sorry, I don't have any money on me," Ky admitted, feeling awkward about wasting the man's time – despite his downright bizarre sales manner. Ky wasn't technically penniless, but even though he couldn't, right at that moment, recall which year the World Dollar had been accepted as the world's first international currency, he was sure that 2016 was vastly too early. 

The man's friendliness dried up very quickly. "What is it with you gawking tourists today?" he complained. "That's two in five minutes."

Ky looked up sharply. "Two...?"

"Second guy to pull up, stare at a paper like it's revolutionised his life and run off without buying it," the man grumbled. "Friend of yours, was he?"

"What did he look like?" Ky asked quickly. "The other man – please, it could be important."

The stall owner shrugged. "Dunno. Long hair. Shirt with some kinda flag on it. One of those European ones. British?"

"Which way did he go?" Ky asked urgently. 

Startled by Ky's sudden interest, the man raised a thumb in the direction leading away from the park. Ky thanked him hurriedly and ran off down the street as fast as the rest of the pedestrian traffic would allow, scanning the crowds for the first sign of a red bandanna over blond hair. 

Axl Low _was_ here! And he could well be Ky's only hope of getting back. 

Half a block brought him to the nearest crossing street, by luck just as the traffic stopped to allow a waiting crowd to cross. Ky caught himself on the brink of demanding the way be cleared in the name of official IPF business _(the IPF wouldn't exist for the best part of two centuries)_. Instead, he had to settle for pushing his way through their midst, apologising hastily as he went. What seemed like more cars than should still exist in every museum on the planet zoomed by him in the next lane over, only a few feet away _(the history books hadn't mentioned how much noise they made, or the smell)_. 

_Five minutes_ , the man had said – give or take everything that confused a witness's sense of time, and it matched his own estimate of how long he'd taken to get his bearings before leaving the park. If Axl kept to the direction he'd been pointed in – if he wasn't moving fast or if he found reason to stop – then Ky had a good chance of catching up. If he took any side-streets, or if he vanished into any of the buildings... well, there was no help in worrying about might-be's, he had to _move_. 

The crossing street behind him marked the start of a busy commercial area; shop fronts lined the ground floors of every building on both sides of the road, all decked out in attention-grabbing colours. A cluster of eye-catching banners overhead were decorated with human silhouettes against nearly fluorescent backgrounds, and could just as well have been artwork or advertising for all the sense he could make of them. Of all possible places to lose a man who was most easily recognised by the patriotic colours of his favourite jacket, this might've been the last one Ky would have chosen. He willed himself to focus and pushed on.

His first glimpse of what might have been Axl, vanishing into a shoe shop a few lengths ahead, turned out to be a woman in a red hat. Ignoring the confused looks of half a dozen other customers, Ky turned on his heel and rushed back out. 

There was a man in a Union Jack T-shirt on the far side of the road, but he was overweight and mostly bald. Down a side street opposite, a store calling itself 'Stars and Stripes' appeared to sell nothing but combinations of the same colours. Ky dragged his attention back to the front just in time to do a double take as a gaggle of Asian tourists began admonishing the strange man who'd run right in front of their camera in loud, fluent _Japanese_. 

That was the last thing that registered properly for most of the next block; even crossing another road registered only with the echo of a dozen horns blaring at him, until out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Axl Low vanishing around a corner on the far side of the road, a few dozen metres ahead. 

The street between was packed with cars, and the next proper crossing point was far too far away. Ky vaulted clean over a parked car, dodged through two lanes of traffic and ran, knowing only that if he didn't catch up now he never would. He went tearing around the corner, missed running headlong into a pedestrian coming around it the other way by a fraction of a second, scanned the street as he ran – _there!_

There was Axl, only a dozen paces away... casually unlocking the door of his car and loading shopping bags into the back seat. He gave Ky a thoroughly un-Axl-like look before apparently opting to ignore him, then climbed into his car and began manoeuvring it jerkily out of his parking spot.

At this distance, he didn't have more than a passing resemblance to the real Axl. 

By the time Ky made it back to the main street, what little hope he'd ever had of finding Axl was fading fast. He _had_ to keep going, had to keep running in the only direction he had any reason to think that Axl might still be going, because it didn't matter that no rational IPF officer would bother following a suspect so far like this, there was no back-up plan. No-one to radio for assistance, no headquarters to go back to, no means to report the suspect's face and know that thousands of officers in a dozen places around the world would know it by the morning. Not even a single local contact or the option of picking up the trail back at one of Axl's known residences or haunts, because here he had none, and Ky had nothing, not even the first idea how to guess at where a seasoned time traveller hailing from a time at least twenty years ago and a country thousands of miles away would _go_ when he found himself here and now. 

That was a problem, because finding Axl was all he had to keep himself moving and focused, from having to think about where he was, how far he was from anything he knew...

It was not, ultimately, desperation that stopped him. 

Even knowing he was about ready to start seeing Axl in shop mannequins – if not cloud formations – he almost cursed aloud as a bus pulled up at a signal light next to him, completely blocking his view of yet another 'Axl' that he'd barely glimpsed on the far side of the street. In his frustration, Ky was already two steps into making his way around the obstruction before it even registered what he'd seen printed on the near-side of the vehicle, large enough to take up the entire side of the bus.

It was an advertisement for a ferry company, the text emblazoned beside two giant photographs of the Statue of Liberty, one a long shot, the other a close up on the head, both taken in what must have been perfect weather. A third image showed a small group of people, leaning over the side of a boat to point with smiling faces. 'Ferries leaving daily – a great day out for all the family!' promised the text. 

When the bus finally moved away, revealing the 'Axl' as another woman in a red and yellow scarf and a tie-dyed T-shirt, inspecting a rack of jewellery, Ky was still standing there. 

Papers that talked about magic as if it were something strange and new, roads choked with enough cars to poison the atmosphere for generations, _Japanese citizens_ wandering casually around a foreign country in broad daylight, to say nothing of a single business district with more wealth than would one day be found anywhere in what was left of the war-ravaged world. And now A-Country's greatest landmark – to his day one of the enduring symbols of the first wave of destruction – whole and undamaged. A _tourist attraction_ rather than a memorial. 

There was nothing to sit on but the pavement beneath his feet when he let his legs give way, and laugh hopelessly at himself until tears ran down his face.

He _couldn't_ be here. Of all the eras in human history – ten years ago, a thousand years ago, ten thousand even – there could be none that had self-destructed so spectacularly as this one; ground from time and memory itself under the advancing feet of a thousand thousand Gears. To suggest such a time could ever be accessible again, even by magic – the peak of humanity's wealth and decadence, _everything_ that had been stripped away as penance for the sin of playing God – why, Ky had never heard anything so ridiculous. The century between his time and this might as well have been an epoch or longer. 

And all he could think about was getting home. 

* * *

It was a while before Ky got to his feet. He wiped his face as best he could, wondered if he was really so far from the war – juggling the work of three men, and with the lives of ten thousand soldiers resting on every sleep-deprived decision he made – that merely being lost and alone in unfamiliar territory was enough to make him lose it. 

He supposed his next best option would be to retrace his steps back to the park where he'd arrived, on the off-chance that Axl might return there looking for him, but it would be a long shot at best. It was hard to believe Axl would have abandoned him here deliberately, but there was a real possibility he'd not realised that anyone else had been dragged back with him in the first place. Axl had clearly recovered from the trip faster than he; if they'd landed even a few metres apart, it was entirely believable that he could have missed the sight of Ky lying in the park altogether. If that was the case, then he wouldn't have much reason to go back there. 

What _would_ a seasoned time traveller like Axl do when he found himself here and now? 

Sensory overload alone was giving him another headache. He came to a halt outside a small cafe and tried, in between the roar of passing traffic, to think. 

He suddenly wished he'd paid a bit more attention to Axl's stories about his timeslipping adventures when he'd had the chance. Axl was personable enough to be the sort who got to know everyone who stayed in his general vicinity very long, more or less without effort, but having encountered him on only a handful of brief occasions since they'd first met at the tournament of 2181, Ky simply didn't know him well enough to predict where he'd go or what he'd do in a situation like this. What he did know was that the timeslipping was involuntary, that Axl himself had no control over when it might happen, or where (not to mention _when_ ) he might be sent. Sooner or later, he was always dragged inexorably back to late twenty-second century, but even Axl himself seemed to have little or no idea how it worked. Ky had no idea if anyone else had ever timeslipped with him before. Even if he did find Axl, he didn't have more than the vaguest idea what it would take to make sure they were transported back together, short handcuffing the two of them together for however long it took. 

For all he knew, Axl could have timeslipped back already. 

It was with a sinking feeling that Ky let himself admit to what had been lurking at the back of his mind like the proverbial elephant in the room ever since he left the newspaper stand – that he might well have no way back at all. Of all the risks he willingly took every day in his chosen line of work, all the ways he'd ever imagined he might end his career, this was one that had never occurred to him. 

It was a depressingly line of thought – he wasn't dead _yet_ – though he always had believed in being prepared for the worst. Even through all those days of the war, when he'd often been kept going by little more than the rocksure conviction that he couldn't die because _he didn't have the time_ for it. But they'd won, and Ky had lived to see it, and the IPF had been the next logical step in his quest to protect the peace he'd worked so hard for. Much as it grated against his nature to miss a single day's work when he had such responsibility to his name, he supposed that if he never made it back... well, the world would have had to find a way to manage without him some day. 

One way or another, he had always expected to go out in the line of duty. But he'd certainly never imagined it might be like this, sent to live out what time he had left in the forgotten end of history, not with a bang but with a whimper. It would be somewhat ironic if this was it, to live through the war, to live through so much that had transpired since, only, he thought gloomily, to reach the end of his days just in time to see it begin anew. 

What would people back home do if he never came back, he wondered? Probably erect some sort of horrible statue of him as a memorial, he thought, with a shudder. Within a few years, it might well be getting advertised as 'a great day out for all the family' too.

He'd never before had cause to doubt that God had a plan for him (even if it was a plan that forced him to spend so many years in the company of Sol Badguy), but how _this_ fit into it, he couldn't begin to imagine. 

Ky shook himself. Being prepared for the worst was all well and healthy, but he really ought to focus on more immediate concerns. He had no reliable way to find Axl. Nor did he have any money, anywhere to stay, anyone he could go to for help, or any way of explaining his predicament that wouldn't make him sound like a madman. 

A lack of options at least kept the matter simple. He could go on wandering these streets for another hour, hoping against hope that he'd run into Axl by pure luck, or he could make an effort to get his bearings, to find out where he was and what, realistically, he could do with himself. Considering that Axl had every reason to be just as disoriented as he, Ky had at least as much chance of tracing his steps that way as any other. 

An inquiry about where he could find the nearest map of the city, addressed to some passing shoppers who took him as a foreign tourist, got him directions to what he gathered was the city's nearest noteworthy landmark. One block's worth of walking brought him to an open park, many times larger than the one where he'd woken up. There was a tall, freestanding arch made of white stone marking the exit onto the street on the far side, and a pond and fountain in the centre, only the very top of the spray immediately visible over the heads of an even larger crowd. Ky paid both features only passing attention; according to his directions, there should have been a signboard showing a city map somewhere around the edge of the square. It took a few minutes of making only miserably slow progress through the mob of people before it dawned on Ky that this couldn't be typical for the area – monuments as permanent as these didn't attract _this_ much attention in any century. Giving up on making any more progress for the moment, Ky scanned the square, seeking any kind of explanation. 

He found his answer standing on a raised stage, just in front of the towering arch on the other side of the square, a feature he'd looked right over at first, unable to tell whether it was more likely to be modern sculpture or construction equipment in the visual overload of a place where everything was so new. On top, a nest of scaffolding surrounded a mechanical engine, covered in chrome plates and tubing, and, somewhat incongruously, wired to an array of old-fashioned light globes that hung from the front of the stage. In front of it, a line of men and women in white coats moved around with the terse body language of professionals under pressure, stepping carefully over and around a network of thick cables connecting everything to everything else. The middle of the engine was obscured behind a grid of dark, rectangular objects (screens, perhaps?), stacked to form a tall square that towered a good metre over the scientists' heads, but there was no question of their being any intent to hide the machine behind it – huge and polished until the sun glinted off every pipe, it dominated the stage. 

It looked to Ky something like an airship engine, but built by someone with no more to go on than a vague memory of having once seen a picture of one, and no real idea about the proper scale of the thing. On the base of the stage, almost obscured by a sea of heads, a banner declared today the day for a demonstration of the world's first magical generator – though in the context of the rest of the scene, it could have been upside down and in Swahili and he would still have gotten the idea. 

The cover story of the newspaper blinked in colourful afterimage behind Ky's eyes. 2016. What a period of history he'd found himself in. Six years after the discovery of magic, and something so ordinary as a magical engine was still cutting edge technology. Who would have thought?

Time to frame that question was time for it to dawn on Ky that the answer very probably included every engineer or scientist he'd ever had the honour of working with; most of whom it was painfully easy to picture laughing at him, should he ever have expressed something so naïve in their presence.

Now that he gave it any real thought he supposed it had been foolish of him to assume the leap could have been so obvious or easy, but engines like this were such an ubiquitous piece of technology in his own time – one of few assets that could genuinely be taken for granted through most of the war years, and such a fundamental part of what magic _was_. The thought of there being more involved in their creation than a few elementary modifications to the 20th century non-magical equivalent had simply never crossed his mind. 

Not for the first time that day, Ky found himself wishing the whirlwind years of his education had afforded more opportunity to study those facets of history without military or tactical significance. Instead, here he was, head full of details about tactical turning posts from wars two hundred years old, lost without comment on what might be one of the defining moments of the century. There were probably dozens of distinguished historians from his own time who would have killed to trade places with him right now. 

On stage, a man in a casual suit ensemble stepped up to a microphone on a stand, and, following a routine with such a long and distinguished tradition that even Ky recognised it, proceeded to try to speak into it, found it switched off, fiddled with the buttons on the side, and succeeded in activating it to a squeal from the speakers that reverberated around the square. The noise from the crowd rose slightly, then dropped in anticipation.

When his speech began, the sound system rendered it in a manner so garbled that Ky could only make out one work in five, but the crowd cheered – or in a few cases booed, making such a racket that he wondered if they'd even be able to hear it when the engine was finally switched on. The announcer's main job seemed to be to draw everyone's attention to a connecting junction in the cables draped prominently over the stage to link mains power to the sound system ( _why_ went somewhere over Ky's head, perhaps it made more sense in context), and yell things like 'are we EXCITED?' at the watching crowd. It looked for a while like this was going to be one of those endlessly drawn out occasions where the main event required such a small fraction of the full time scheduled that the audience would be made to wait through an hour or more of posturing and suspense-building before anyone got to see what they'd come for. Instead, it was only about ten minutes of introduction before the speaker finished to general applause. 

The dark grid in the middle of the engine woke suddenly to life, revealing itself to be a stack of narrow-edged television screens, each working to display a portion of the overall picture. The sound quality was only a little better than before, but among the images were more than a few that were eerily familiar. With musical backing and rather more showy visual effects than could be necessary, the video presented the audience with a five-minute outline of the history of the discovery of magic – the laboratory breakthroughs (generic scenes of scientists in lab-coats doing something technical in a white, sterile, environment, observing as a woman concentrated on lighting and extinguishing a candle), the disbelief from the scientific community (newspaper headlines and stacks of scientific journals, images of serious looking men arguing with each other via a split screen), the rising estimates of what proportion of the population had natural magical capability (more individuals summoning gusts of wind or turning water to ice, a news report on the first known magically assisted bank heist). The narrative moved on to name the scientists responsible for the recognising that this new power source could mean free and unlimited energy (more scientists, more newspapers) – a revelation that had taken place within a whirlwind of ongoing controversy from the scientific community, the religious community, the fossil fuels industries, the scattered groups of environmentalists who'd convinced themselves there _had_ to be a catch, all rushing by in a flicker of warring headlines... 

The sheer depth and breadth of wonder and feeling conveyed between those few minutes of video, magnified in the reactions of the crowd around him, were a little dizzying. A hundred and fifty years from now, every child would learn the first part of the video – magic was discovered, the world would never be the same again – but who would have thought that the discovery of something so wonderful would have made so many different people so _angry?_

The video wound up on a high note, revealing all that had come before as no more than prelude for the real excitement of the day. The music reached its crescendo as one of the scientists stepped up and made a show of yanking down a big lever just to the left of the screens, and the machine behind hummed to life. For a few seconds, nothing much happened apart from a gradual increase in volume, then finally the first of the light-globes in the array flickered to life, then the second, then the third... Ky spent a few moments bemused by how _slow_ the world's 'first magical generator' was proving to be before it dawned on him that, like the rest of the performance, it was all for show. If more proof were needed, the lighting of the very last globe was accompanied by a line of smaller globes strung around the edge of the array like Christmas lights that began flashing in a running pattern. The crowd cheered; up on stage, someone looked to be about to sever the connection to the main cable altogether and switch the whole sideshow to run solely off the new generator. Ky had just time to note the beginnings of a faint staticy sensation rising against his skin – like the air before a thunderstorm – time to notice that the humming was still increasing steadily in volume, when it all went horribly wrong. 

Something on the top of the engine gave an ear-splitting _bang_ and let off a shower of sparks; through the smoke, Ky could just make out that one of the pipes had blown itself free, slamming into the side of the scaffolding hard enough that a whole layer crumpled into the one below. There was barely time to note that the noise from the machine was still rising before every lightbulb in the array blew out at once, setting the banner beneath on fire. The scientists on stage fell about, covered their heads, ran to and from the side of the machine and began to yell and argue with each other. Two tried to move the giant lever back up; at first it wouldn't budge, and when a third came to help, their success was rewarded by a second explosion that shook the whole stage. The whine from the machine was approaching ear-splitting pitch. The ripple of confusion that had been running through the crowd became panic, then erupted into chaos as everyone tried to get away from the overloading machine at once.

If Ky had had a minute to think, it might have occurred to him that getting involved might be the last thing he should be doing. Whatever happened here was history – a hundred and fifty years gone, history he had no part in, no right to interfere with. Anything he did could irrevocably change the future, and how could someone as uneducated as he have any idea what the consequences might be, whether what he did to change it would be for the better?

But he didn't have a minute to think, he didn't even give himself a second. All he had was the knowledge that an engine of that size overloading in a populated area would be catastrophic, and that he might well be the only man present who could stop it. His only doubt was the horrible possibility that, caught in the press of a panicking mob determined to carry him the other way, he wouldn't get there in time. 

The square had never been designed for mob control, but it had this in its favour: the fence which separated the edge of the garden from the street was well below waist height for the majority of the audience and low enough for them to scramble over with ease. That mattered; it allowed the crowd to disperse in all directions at once and reduced the pressure on the few main exits. Even so, to get back to the centre stage went against the flow from any direction. The only route open was straight through the centre of the pond – even at only a foot or so deep it presented enough of an obstacle to deter all but a few of the fleeing people who splashed past Ky as he ran. On the far side Ky made straight for the stage, and by a second stroke of luck found it starting to clear, the one line through the whole square which everyone was trying to get away from at right-angles. Ky shoved and elbowed his through what remained of the crowd and vaulted on to the stage.

The air around the engine had gone icy cold, what had looked from a distance like steam was more like tendrils of mist, the surface of the metal plating already covered in frost. Cold blue lightning crackled between the pipes above like the output from a Tesla coil. The charge building up within made his skin prickle until it stung, every step he took closer sent another jolt of static leaping between his boots and the floor. When he was close enough to touch it Ky turned and scanned the buildings nearby; he needed one with a lightning conductor, not too tall, not too close, not too far away... there, _that_ one would have to do, he hadn't the time to be picky. With his gaze fixed on his target and one arm outstretched towards it, Ky gave himself just a second for a quick prayer that this wouldn't hurt as much as last time, and pressed his other hand on to the side of the machine. 

For an endless moment his whole body burned, white hot – or freezing cold, too sudden for his nerves to tell one way or the other. The least he should have been allowed was close his eyes, but he had to stay focused on his target as long as he could, and stay focused he did until his vision whited out; until everything whited out, every sense, every sensation...

He didn't know which way was up when he came back to himself, couldn't see; wasn't even sure whether his eyes were open or closed (and feeling well and truly past his quota for moments of disorientation for the day). Awareness of his body trickled back to him with the inevitability of discovering that _everything_ hurt. That was good news, he thought dimly – at least he could still feel everything.

It was a surprise to find he seemed to be (mostly) upright, as best he was in any state to tell, but he was leaning against... something. Not the side of the machine either... oh, was that someone holding him up? His first reaction was to think how terribly _nice_ that was, when he didn't even know anyone here, though he wasn't entirely sure he'd wouldn't have preferred to be lying down. 

Ky groaned and tried to remember how his eyelids worked, but as the difference between 'open' and 'closed' was the difference between a black blur filled with white dots and a white blur filled with black ones, he couldn't be entirely sure he'd gotten it right. Hearing should have been a better bet, but it still took him some time to make out that someone was talking to him. 

The first words he made sense of might have been, "You with me?"

"...who?" he managed.

"Your new biggest fan," said the someone, probably male, almost, but not quite, familiar, then "...the fuck d'you do to yourself?"

It was probably meant to be hypothetical, but Ky did his best. "Channel the charge... ground it safely..."

"Whatever you did, it worked," said the man, and relief drained more than a little of Ky's will to keep himself standing. The man made an 'oof' noise as he found himself supporting even more weight. "You're heavier than you look. I'd call you an ambulance, but there's bound to be a dozen on their way already."

Ky was just lucid enough by then to remember that scrutiny from those sort of officials might not be in his best interests. "I'll be alright," he insisted, "just need a minute."

"Like hell you do," said the man, who, thanks to Ky's recovering eyesight, had now resolved all the way to a man-shaped blur. 

Ky supposed he didn't have any way to argue that wouldn't make him sound irrational, but he was suddenly very aware of how exposed they were up on stage. "We should get down from here," he suggested. 

The other man made some passing protests about whether it would be a good idea for him to be moving that far, but helped him across the stage and down the stairs. The area directly around the stage had mostly cleared; the danger might be past, but the fleeing crowd would have had no way to know that the lightning bolt that had just leapt right out of the engine would be the end of it. The last of the white-coated scientists paused long enough to curse at them loudly in German before hurrying off after his companions. 

Ky actually found himself feeling a little better to be moving, and was almost ready to support his own weight by the time they got to the bottom of the stairs. Nevertheless, he was all too happy to sit down in the shade of the great arch once they reached it, and let his eyes recover without the glare of full sunlight to contend with. 

"Any better?" asked the man, after a bit. Ky was still not entirely sure where he'd come from; he didn't seem to be with the officials. In the back of his mind was the idea that he'd caught a glimpse of someone else climbing on to the stage ahead of him, but it already seemed a long time ago.

"Much," he replied. At least one of his prayers had been answered this day – the whole experience had been _much_ less painful than the last time he'd been faced with an overloading engine and few other options (even if that did have more to do with this being a very primitive, low-powered engine than divine intervention on his behalf). His body ached, but only a little worse than the norm after a hard day's work, and his eyes had already recovered enough that he could focus on his hands without more than a few spots crowding around the edges. Testing them, he took what should have been his first clear look up at the man who'd helped him down off the stage. 

...and now apparently he was hallucinating. How lovely. Maybe he was in worse shape than he thought – even if it was, on reflection, a little too easy to imagine what it meant that he was imagining Sol's face after yet another ill-advised act of senseless heroism.

Fortunately, the man himself didn't immediately recognise how stupidly Ky was staring at him. "Lightning magic, huh? Never seen it used like that before."

Ky rubbed his eyes and went back to staring down at his hands – it was probably safer. "It's not exactly something I do every day."

"Ha. Wouldn't make a habit of it either if I were you."

"What were you doing up there?" Ky asked idly, then realising this sounded more accusatory than he'd meant, added, "You weren't with the officials before, were you?"

"Nah, same as you – thought maybe I could help. I'm in magical research myself – different area, but I read all the _New Mechanics_ articles their lot keep churning out. Call me Frederick."

Ky risked another glance up as he reached to shake the proffered hand. "I'm Ky." On a second look, Frederick's hair was much shorter than Sol's, even when the latter's was tied back, and the plain shirt and jeans he was wearing didn't look like anything he could picture coming from Sol's wardrobe. He had startlingly blue eyes – which was not to say that there was anything remotely unusual about the colour, except that it seemed completely out of place in what otherwise still looked to Ky far too much like Sol's face for comfort. The thought occurred to him that perhaps he wasn't hallucinating, that Frederick might have looked just the same even had Ky met him while not temporarily flash-blind, and he didn't know what to make of that. His voice wasn't as deep as Sol's, and his accent was stronger, but the inflections on the odd word here and there were a little too close for comfort.

"Thank you," Ky added, suddenly feeling the previous had been rather inadequate, "for all your help..."

Frederick shrugged it off. "You did all the real work, I just caught you on the way down. Ky, huh?" The way he said the name suggested him trying it out and deciding he liked it. "We'll be seeing that all through the papers and probably on the back of a medal before long. You probably saved a lot of lives today. Not to mention a metric crapload of property damage."

Ky groaned aloud. If there was anything he could afford _less_ than the attention of a batch of well-meaning medics... he'd only been in 2016 an hour or so, and already he'd broken history. "I'd really rather avoid all the attention," he said, by way of explanation for what must have seemed a very odd reaction. "I never... I mean, of course I wanted to help, but I... I don't know what I'd do with it all."

This was so close to the sort of rhetoric he used all the time at home when yet another official function showed up on his calendar, it didn't occur to him there would be anything suspicious about it, but Frederick had taken on an un-Sol-like look that suggested cogs turning at speed. 

"You here with the German team?" he asked. "You've got a bit of an accent."

"I'm _French_ ," Ky corrected him quickly. 

"Same part of Europe, more or less." Before Ky could take offence at that, Frederick added, "Look, anyone could tell the Germans are going to be up to their balls in it the moment the cops get here. I wouldn't want to admit I knew them from Adam either. But _no-one_ learns to do what you just did by practising in their backyard, and at last check the best magical research agency in France was hardly off the ground."

Ky was becoming very worried about where Frederick might be going with this. He could ill afford to contradict any of it when he hadn't the faintest idea what the state magical research had been in France in this period. 

"Look, don't tell me," said Frederick, spotting his discomfort, "let me guess. Germany's right over the border from France, and if the Mannheim team knew what you could do they'd snap you up so fast you'd leave your ass behind. So maybe someone's assistant comes along and says, we've got vouchers for twenty airline tickets for this thing in the States and only nineteen on the main team – why don't we offer our star subject a free holiday? No-one's ever going to look at the bills that closely, who's going to know he's not meant to be here? It probably sounded like a better idea to our subject before he realised the whole team were going to be spending the rest of their trip answering questions from men in black suits." Frederick raised his eyebrows, waiting for Ky's reaction to all his clever detective work.

It _was_ clever – almost too good to be true. If Ky-the-research-subject had only been hired recently and any members of the team who did know him would have good reason to deny any knowledge of who he was or what he was doing on their business trip, it might even work. "That's... really quite an astute guess," he said carefully, not quite ready to commit any further. 

Frederick grinned, pleased with himself. "Might be a good time for our guy to think about dropping out of sight for a bit and making his own way home when things have calmed down. Assuming no-one's going to miss him and come looking."

"I don't think my name would be on any of the official retinue lists," said Ky, with very nearly perfect honesty. "But I don't really have anywhere else to go. I haven't even any money on me."

Frederick squatted down in front of him so he could make eye contact on the same level, his grin taking on a subtly different nature and giving Ky the slightly uncomfortable feeling that he'd managed to tell Frederick exactly what he'd been hoping to hear. 

"Maybe I can help you out," he offered.

It occurred to Ky, under the automatic wave of gratitude, that whatever Frederick suggested next was unlikely to be strictly legal, that he himself was already lying by omission, and the more he associated with anyone here, the more he'd have to lie, or risk changing the past, or both. 

It didn't occur to him to say 'no'. After everything he'd already done today, it seemed a little late to worry about what more damage to history he could possibly do.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not technically a new chapter, as this WIP is honestly more or less abandoned at this point - however, I _did_ recently throw together a fairly detailed outline of my original plans for the rest of the story (posted with a little more context [here](http://rallamajoop.livejournal.com/125702.html#comments) on my LiveJournal) in response to a tumblr ask. Since I know there are a handful of people subscribed to this story, I'm cross-posting it here as a new chapter so that they'll get the notification.

  
Chapter 2 would have opened with a flashback to the war – some time when Ky was badly injured, and woke up in the Order’s medical wing to find Sol sitting by his bedside, doing his gruff asshole ‘not like I was worried about you or nothing’ routine, and fooling exactly no-one. The stunt which landed Ky there involving preventing an airship motor from overloading in much the same manner as the experimental engine that blew out in chapter 1, during an attack by a Megadeath Gear (three guesses where Ky channelled the leftover energy in _that_ instance. The Gear did not survive the experience). Of course, this was a much younger and less experienced Ky, a much more powerful engine, and even tenser circumstances, and the short version is that the feedback left him in a coma for several days. Sol is both generally displeased and grudgingly impressed with Ky for taking such a crazy risk. Ky, while only half awake, is very much aware that his actions saved the lives of probably everyone on the airship _and_ took out a Megadeath Gear, and is infinitely more touched than chastised by Sol’s transparent display of affection, and feels as blissfully content as he’s ever felt in his life. Somewhere in this conversation, there would almost certainly have been the unsubtle suggestion that this wasn’t the first time Sol had seen Ky pull that stunt with the engine, but this would just as certainly have gone over Ky’s head.  
  
Cut back to the present. (Or, indeed, the past! Ain’t time travel stories fun?) Though it probably goes without saying, Frederick’s proposal is to give Ky a place to stay and keep his head down until things calm down in exchange for playing magical research subject for his lab (remember, this is what he’s assuming was Ky’s day job back in France/Germany anyway). They’d arrive at Frederick’s lab to meet his colleague Maria, who’s transparently my own fanon version of Justice. (For the record, pretty much this whole plot long predated much of anything ‘officially’ revealed on the subject by post GG2 canon, and certainly wouldn’t have been rewritten to incorporate the canon version anyway.) Maria would’ve had long red hair (invariably tied back – she works in a lab, duh), a keen mind, a no-nonsense attitude and only slightly more tact than Frederick. May as well mention that my image of her was fairly heavily inspired by Maya of the Iron Man comics through Warren Ellis and the Knauf’s runs circa 2004, as a similarly driven biological scientist with a questionable moral code and loyalties, and an interest in building human weaponry. (Honestly, considering the number of obvious similarities, _not_ basing her on Maya at least a little bit would’ve been something of an effort on my part. I was really very fond of Maya.)  
  
Since Frederick and Maria are working on biological applications of magic with military funding and the eventual goal of using human subjects, and because I was obviously having great fun playing with the public cultural response to the whole ‘magic’ thing, their work would have drawn the ire of various religious or ethical groups in the form of a lot of angry letters and the semi-regular picketing of their lab. Actually, the first we’d see of the picketers would be them having turned up at the much newer-and-shinier but quite unassociated lab next door due to an ongoing misunderstanding over which is which, and would thus fail to impede Frederick in reaching the door in any meaningful way. Frederick obviously finds the whole situation hilarious. He’s long been keeping track of the various groups who’ve sent them angry mail on a bingo card pinned to the wall, and considers it a matter of mild frustration that an _actually_ -related lab on the other side of the country claims to have hit bingo already (particularly because, according to Frederick, they only filled out the ‘Wiccan’ square because the mother of one of the researchers complained about him missing family gatherings for work reasons, and this is obviously cheating). Ky’s own religious leanings doubtless come up at some stage, but I have zero recollection of how I was going to work this in. Presumably the idea of him trying to get his head around magic being _less_ acceptable than other modern technology from a religious perspective would have featured somewhere.  
  
The fact that history will ultimately prove that all those protesters _did_ actually have valid concerns (even if largely by coincidence) about the research going on under the auspices of the Gear Project is, of course, the subtextual irony of the whole situation. Or will be in retrospect.  
  
Anyway. Back to the plot.  
  
So, Frederick and Ky would have reached the lab, and met Maria, who’d just watched the whole exploding-engine fiasco on live TV. She probably even saw Frederick running towards the danger, come to think of it, and he’s naturally going to be awfully smug about having managed to recruit Ky out of the whole mess. Like her co-worker, Maria would experience no qualms whatsoever regarding Ky’s debatably-legal status, and would have no reservations about offering him her own spare room as a place to stay for the duration, under the perfectly reasonable logic that Frederick lives in a one-bedroom apartment that he almost never cleans, but realistically because she knows him well enough to know Frederick’s interest in his new test subject was likely to remain purely scientific for about ten minutes max. Most, though probably not all, of this would go over Ky’s head.  
  
Within a couple of days, the papers would start reporting that the team responsible for the exploding engine had attempted to shift the blame to an unnamed saboteur seen behaving suspiciously at the scene of the crime, supplying a couple of stills of Ky in action ( _incredibly_ blurry, to the point of being near-useless for identification, but obvious from context to him and Frederick) as evidence. While he’s obviously just a convenient scapegoat and the real evidence will almost certainly speak in his favour, this does supply Ky with excellent justification for keeping his head down and his identity hazy for as long as he needs it. At some stage, Frederick would probably have arranged Ky a fake ID. Ky would be naturally uncomfortable with Frederick’s blasé attitude toward the law, but even more uncomfortably aware of how little space he had to complain. He’d also make it known in this period that he’d very much like to contact a British ‘friend’ living in America by the name of Axl Low, of no fixed address, just in case Frederick or Maria might have any hope of helping Ky find him. They won’t, but it sets up stuff to come.  
  
Plot from here on in gets considerably hazier for a while, though we’d be guaranteed at least one scene where Frederick gets to cover Ky’s shirtless body in sensors and put him through his magical paces in the lab. (Do I need to mention that Frederick enjoys these sessions immensely on both a professionally scientific _and_ a decidedly unprofessional level? This probably goes without saying. Ky doing magic is like Christmas for the guy on so many different levels.) Various conversation here where Ky would do his best to explain where he’d obtained a level of magical proficiency unheard of in the current century without outright telling any more lies than he could avoid. If Frederick found the lack of detail suspicious he wouldn’t much care. Dialogue would make it clear he’s well aware (via more scientific literature or news) that at least one school of obscure, semi-mystical martial arts has been quietly practicing magic for generations before anyone doing serious scientific work ever found out it existed, and considers this exactly the sort of idiosyncratic bullshit on which the whole field is founded. Ky would doubtless reflect on the nature of magical research in this century with the knowledge that it would all ultimately lead to the Gear Project, but remain largely ambivalent about the probable danger attached to Frederick and Maria’s own work, or his own contributions – as far as he knows, they’re a number of decades too early for that to be even plausible. He’d never hear of Frederick’s research by that name until much too late.  
  
Frederick would admit to having tried doing magic himself, but having so little natural talent for it he could just barely light a candle on his own steam. The fact that fire is evidently the element Frederick favours will not much help Ky’s ongoing unease about his resemblance to Sol. The moment when Frederick puts on a Queen record in his presence will have much the same effect.  
  
Eventually, Frederick would ask Ky out for dinner or drinks (probably drinks) one evening. This goes swimmingly until fairly late in the proceedings, when Frederick asks, bluntly but not unpleasantly, “So, am I getting anywhere with you here?” When Ky responds with confusion, Frederick admits he’s been hitting on him all evening. Now, Ky in our story is not completely dense, but nor is he particularly used to being casually hit on (or at least not by anyone prepared to be so up front about it), and has been so busy with being distracted by Frederick’s resemblance to Sol that any other subtext in their interactions has been largely lost on him. What this means is that his reaction to Frederick’s admission mostly consists of him apologising for not having noticed. Here, we probably have some brief exchange to the effect of Frederick giving Ky the option of the ‘not actually into men/you in particular’-out, no hard feelings, and Ky notably declining to take it. This is where Frederick declares he obviously needs to be less subtle, and goes in for a kiss.  
  
In brief: it goes _well_. Ky accepts the suggestion they take things somewhere more private, and they go back to Frederick’s and proceed to have sex. While Ky unreservedly enjoys the experience, he also spends it confused and fascinated by the physical differences between Sol and Frederick, and the climax justifiably anxious about the real danger of saying the wrong name. (Possibly right before this is where Frederick puts some Queen on the stereo, because that’s about as much fucking romance as you’ll get from the guy. Or possibly, the morning after. Either option amuses me. Also, according to some old emails to a friend about the idea at the time, I was also planning on throwing in a mention of Ky finding an old stack of Highlander DVDs somewhere in Sol's apartment, which Sol got into because of the Queen-soundtrack: "Mostly he just tuned in for the opening and ending themes, but he wound up watching the whole show more often than he'll admit to most people. And spent a whole lot of time snarking at that idiot main character with the sword who wastes so much time trying to take responsibility for everything and pontificating on about all that moral crap [and the terrible ~angst of being immortal], because SERIOUSLY." Why yes indeed I do have a great fondness for a little dramatic irony, in case you hadn't noticed.  >D)  
  
Ky spends the morning after feeling awkwardly guilty, though largely fails to harsh Frederick’s considerable buzz. Hating to think he could be leading Frederick on under false pretences, either then or within the next day or so he confesses freely that he’s unsure whether it’s a good idea for them to pursue a relationship. He explains that the truth is Frederick bears an uncanny resemblance to a ‘friend’ with whom he’d long shared a tumultuous and confusing relationship, and that it’s very likely much of his attraction to Frederick derives from Ky trying to sort out his feelings for someone else. Frederick takes this all remarkably well (possibly better when it comes out that Ky isn’t sure if he’s ever going to see this other guy again), and volunteers himself for as much ‘sorting out his feelings’ as Ky is up for. (It’s hopefully evident here that Frederick is hopelessly enamoured with Ky, and will willingly take anything and everything he wants to offer. The possibility of playing therapeutic fuckbuddy does not put him off at all.) Ky takes this with great relief. He’s still less than sure about the wisdom and morality pursuing a relationship with Frederick, but to have at least one of his secrets out in the open is a great weight off his mind. The relieved sexual tension probably doesn’t hurt either.  
  
When they arrive at work together the morning (or Monday) after, Maria probably gives them one long look then says absolutely nothing about the subject until the question of moving Ky’s few accumulated belongings over to Frederick’s place comes up. Possibly at some stage she finds the excuse to point out to Ky that he’s under no obligation to fuck either of them for sheltering his fugitive arse if he doesn’t want to, just in case there was any confusion on this front, but that would be about the limit of her investment in the subject.  
  
Somewhere around this point is when Ky completely by accident just about walks into Axl on a random street, to the great excitement of both parties.  
  
I had some ideas about how Axl’s been dealing with this particular time-jump – he’s close the time he was trying to get back to than ever before, but still not quite close enough for things to be working out for him, and he still doesn’t know how much longer it’ll last (quoting directly from an old email, "This actually might be the closest he's ever gotten to home, he's probably trying to get back to England and failing because he doesn't have a passport. Or any money. But he's probably enjoying himself, because at least he's made it back to the early 21st century, which is only about a decade late.") Ky brings him back to the lab, where Frederick does some tests on the both of them, _finally_ finds a match for some of the most bafflingly inexplicable readings he’s been getting from Ky all along, and begins to actually make sense out of how Axl Low came to become unstuck in time. With the science unexpectedly backing them up (and Axl much less inclined to keep his mouth shut and play conscientious time-traveller), Ky and Axl finally tell the truth (or at least some of it) about their having come from the far future. Frederick uncovers enough to be able to make some solid inferences about the bizarre temporal elastic-band mechanism that keeps Axl on the move and when his next jump might be. Conclusion: the elastic-band effect is intensifying, and it’ll probably come down to a matter of days. Ky should snap back too whether he’s near Axl or not – probably not at the exact same moment, but probably not long before or after. Frederick and Ky both take this with all the mixed feelings you’d expect.  
  
Ky is still incredibly careful with how much he lets on about the future. This is going to backfire horribly, because fate works that way, but not for lack of effort on his part.  
  
But here’s the big thing Ky still doesn’t know about the present: Frederick’s been working on the Gear Project all along. Maybe the more obvious work and animal research is being done at another lab, while he and Maria slave away at the unglamorous-but-utterly-crucial micro-scale genetic work. But because this fic is nothing if not founded on classic whomp-scale clichés, the other thing Ky doesn’t know is that Frederick is dying, and has probably less than a year to live. And knowing this – and because Frederick is a career mad scientist with all the moral fibre of a rejected lab rat – he’s volunteered himself as a human test subject for his own project, for a very secret procedure no ethics committee would _dream_ of approving to use barely-tested technology to rewrite basically every cell in his body. If it works, score, he lives! And if it doesn’t, well, fuck it – he was gonna die anyway, and what better way to die than for muthafucking _science_? Even a failure will be worth more than _years_ of animal trials.  
  
[ Incidentally: HAHAHA take THAT, newspaper guy! Science really _was_ months away from curing cancer! /largely accidental brick joke ]  
  
And what Ky _also_ doesn’t realise is that Frederick is all kinds of _not stupid_. He’s got himself down for a risky procedure that will either kill him or make him immortal. And here’s this guy from the far future who – get this – _knows someone in the future with an uncanny resemblance to him_.  
  
Also, said future is gonna have Ky in it. He’s really okay with that.  
  
Any last misgivings Frederick might have had about going for that procedure while he’s still healthy enough to have his best chances of surviving just evaporated.  
  
Of course, by the time Ky finds out what’s going to happen and finally puts those last pieces of the puzzle together for himself, it’s too late to stop it. (The little part of him that doesn’t _want_ to stop it, because history is history and that would mean no _Sol_ is more than he has time to deal with.)  
  
History happens as history was fated to. Sol is converted into a Gear, goes berserk and busts his way out of the lab in a hail of fire and ruin. The only thing now standing between him and an untold number of human casualties before he burns his rage out? Ky Kiske.  
  
They fight. It’s horrible and vicious and Ky is horrendously out matched on power alone, but Sol’s powers are newly-hatched, he’s in incredible pain and he’s not exactly thinking with his frontal lobes, while Ky’s been doing this shit all his mortal life. Ky wins.  
  
Frederick comes back to himself naked in a pile of rubble. Every scientist involved in the project at the main lab is dead, most of them guys he knew – and trusted enough to involve in the most illegal and ill-advised stunt he’d ever done. The reality of how horribly, _horrifically_ wrong his clever plan to cheat death has gone begins to sink in in stages. Ky rushes to his side, holds him, and finally admits everything he’d omitted from his account of the future: the Gear Project, the War, Sol – it all comes out at once. Small comfort to Frederick at this stage, but he takes it as well as anyone realistically could. There is undoubtably sobbing involved.  
  
(Maria is now just about the only surviving member of the whole team. It takes fifty years for anything related to what was left of the project to ever surface again.)  
  
I don’t know exactly when Ky snaps back to the future, but we’re talking hours at most. Probably he leaves Frederick for a moment for some logical short-term reason, and never comes back.  
  
So Ky goes through another dizzying time slip and wakes up back in what is, to him, the present. At a loss to even begin figure out how to deal with everything he’s been through, he makes his way home. He finds Sol Badguy basically waiting on his doorstep.  
  
Let’s take a sec here just to remind ourselves that that from Frederick/Sol’s perspective, it’s been _150 years_ since Ky vanished back to the future, during which time he had to go through meeting a much younger and more judgemental version of the Ky he first met, not to mention a solid century of World War III. None of this was fun. So his reaction to seeing Ky’s finally caught up with him starts with something along the lines of, “So it’s finally you, huh? Been waiting for that to happen so long I don’t even fucking know what to do with it anymore.” Ky, meanwhile, is rapidly reassessing _every goddamn thing_ Sol’s ever said or done to him over all the years they’ve known each other in light of the realisation that Sol’s spent the whole time _knowing_ they’re going to end up here, while desperate not to say or do anything that might mess up delicate temporal continuity. Not having had the benefit a healthy hundred years plus to process all that shit, Ky more or less breaks down on the spot and starts apologising for things that aren’t in any way his fault, until Sol is all like, oh fuck it, kiss me already. And then there is reunion sex. Seriously, _so damn much_ reunion sex, you have no idea. (As described in another old email: "Sol is more like, I fucking waited a hundred and fucking fifty fucking years for you you fucking bastard. And then I had to stick around and _watch you going through fucking puberty!_ DO YOU HAVE ANY FUCKING IDEA WHAT THAT WAS LIKE? The salient point being that they are going to have an awful lot of catching up to do with that verb Sol keeps using.") In the process of which, Ky gets a little stuck on whether to call him Sol or Frederick now, but Sol’s like, ‘eh, whichever’ – though ultimately Ky winds up switching back to ‘Sol’ the further in they get, because he and Frederick may have had a confusing sort of thing for a few weeks back in 201X, but they both really fell in love with each other during all those years of fighting back to back during the war, and with each other the rest of the time. And all is well with the world, the end.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still not a proper new chapter as such, but back in 2010 I wrote a side-story set in the same universe, covering Sol's POV of related events, as a gift for a friend who'd acted as my sounding board when I first started throwing around ideas for this fic. Won't make any sense if you haven't read the summary of the rest of the fic first (see chapter 2), but in that context it should read fine. This is almost certainly the very final thing I'll ever get to writing or posting for this story, but at least I can share this much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come to think of it, this one could probably use a minor content warning, though it’s spoilery, so I’ll stick it as a highlight-to-read deal: Contains discussion of seriously ill-advised underage sex, though this is not described explicitly.

A hundred and fifty years spent waiting to meet your lost love sounds like the height of romantic tragedy in principle; in practice, it was mostly just a long, dull slog.  
  
The reality was that Sol didn't spend that much of those hundred and fifty odd years thinking about Ky. It had been damned easy to fall for him, when he'd been just a pretty, mysterious foreigner with a few eccentric habits and the kind of magical talent researchers only dreamed of, and Frederick had been still mostly convinced he only had a year to live. Now, with enough magic running through his own veins to give even Ky a run for his money, and the future stretching out in front of him to god-knows-when like some kind of warped magic-eye puzzle, any romantic notions about the situation dried up pretty fast. Adjusting to the Gear-transformation alone was more than enough to keep him occupied, and driving himself mad with grief over some guy he'd only known a couple of months wasn't Frederick's style, or Sol's.  
  
Amazing how it took the shine off a relationship when you found out your life's work was going to be used to start the next world war before you saw your better half again.  
  
By the time Sol was in any kind of state fit to deal with society again (and wasn't _that_ a story all of its own) enough years had passed to take the edge off. Most of his early regrets were the million things he should've asked when he had the chance – weighed against the odds he just _didn't want to know_ , which were pretty considerable on a lot of matters. The part that really ate at him was not having the faintest idea how long he was going to have to wait. It had to be a couple of generations at least, going by the fifteen-odd words he'd ever exchanged with Ky on the subject, but whether that meant fifty years or five hundred he hadn't a clue. Probably not much good hoping it'd be closer to the shorter figure. It would've been so much easier to get over the guy if Sol had just _known_ he was never going to see him again; knowing they were going to see each other again but not knowing _when_ was enough to make him wish Ky really _had_ just dropped off the face of the planet for good, – in his more maudlin moments. On the other hand, spending his life counting down the days to 2258 or whenever might have been its own kind of torture. Damned if you did, damned if you didn't. Story of his life.  
  
Even that was assuming anything Ky could have told him about the future still applied, after his own time trip. Frederick had never been an expert on the subject, but the reigning theories from back in his physicist days had held that, should the practical concerns behind time travel were ever be solved, changing the past would not merely be possible, it would be pretty much unavoidable. Merely setting foot in a time so far before his birth would probably be enough to guarantee Ky would never be born, to say nothing of what else it might change. Of course, those reigning theories would fallen on their face when met with Axl Low, so god only knew what kind of spanner that threw into the works. He'd made it sound like he'd been bouncing around through time for years without noticing any ill effects, but it wasn't as though he'd been looking for it in enough scientific detail to count as a reliable source. Maybe he'd get to meet Ky again, just like he'd been told he would. Maybe he wouldn't. Sol just didn't fucking know what to expect.  
  
All in all, it was for the best that by the end of the first couple of decades, he'd long since gotten to where he only remembered Ky a couple of times a year, if that. That was how it stayed over following few decades, though whether it was his frustratingly good new Gear-memory or whatever else, those 'couple of times a year' never did stop happening whenever his subconscious dug up a suitable excuse. Anyone who believed it was mere _coincidence_ that the piece of the Outrage designed to channel lightning was built in the form of a light-weight broadsword in blue and white would believe just about anything. That was actually one of his healthier moments – mostly it was hard to think of Ky without getting gloomy, but picturing him using Sol's newly-minted Fuuraiken – that made him grin like he'd hardly grinned in half a century.  
  
The whole Outrage project was a little bit Ky's fault, and would have been more if Sol had actually needed a time traveller to warn him that rumours that the Gear project was being revived, now with military funding, _fifty years_ after its conception (and at least a good twenty after everyone involved in its first incarnation should have been up for retirement) was going to be bad news. Ky may not have been sure whether to dare anything that might prevent the war before it started, but Sol knew exactly what sort of bastard it would make him if he didn't even try. He'd been waiting a long time, and building a big gun and tracking those fuckers the hell down was exactly as much subtly as he had the patience left for.  
  
That would have been a pretty good story of its own too. Shame about the ending.  
  
He never did get the Outrage finished in time; cutting-edge magical engineering and tracking down clandestine government research agencies were _both_ full-time jobs when you had no idea when your deadline was. Might not have made much difference anyway, when he never did get as far as testing the thing. He did find the right lab in the end, the trouble was he found it mostly by accident and not nearly prepared; though probably nothing on earth could have prepared him for the sight of what they'd done to Maria. Or what she'd be capable of doing to him.  
  
The image was still burned into the back of his eyelids when he woke up again, eight months later, to discover he'd overslept and missed the start of the war by four whole weeks. He found himself in the pitch darkness of a solid concrete bunker under a magical dampening field in its death throws due to external damage, a drip in his arm that had run out of sedative to feed into his bloodstream, feeling more violated than he'd ever known a man could feel.  
  
Failure stung like a bitch, but put in perspective, it was only slightly worse than his head at that point. The concrete of the bunker turned out not to have been made nearly thick enough.  
  
The Outrage was gone by the time he got back to where he’d left it, which was no surprise and only slightly more of a disappointment. It was going to take more than one big gun to win this war. Funny, he’d always had the impression it was going to be humans _using_ Gears against humans using... whatever – _more_ Gears, probably. From what little Ky had told him, he’d never clicked it was going to be _Gears against humans_. Somehow he’d gone from hiding what he was because people wouldn’t understand what it meant, to hiding what he was because they _would_ when he wasn’t even conscious.  
  
Fat lot of good it did whining about technicalities. He’d known a war was coming; time to get off his ass and help win it.  
  
Keeping busy made the guilt... bearable. Most of the time. Maybe Ky had been right – maybe there was nothing he could have done to prevent things going this far.  
  
Maybe he really did have meeting Ky again to look forward to some day – more than he’d ever even let himself dream in years.  
  
Maybe that was just setting himself up for disappointment, but whatever kept you going, right?  
  
It was a pretty faint glimmer of optimism under the oppressive gloom of the century of war that followed, and under the horrible weight of the next fifty years or so, even that eventually spluttered out.  
  
The hundredth anniversary of the day Frederick became Sol arrived, and he marked the occasion by stealing two large barrels of hard liquor (give or take the realistic odds anyone was ever coming back for them – _finding_ was the word he preferred) and conducting the world’s first scientific experiment into whether or not a hundred-year-old humanoid Gear could still get himself roaring drunk. It would have been more rigorous if he’d had more than the faintest idea what he was drinking; it was the kind of alcohol that was brewed out of anything the local farmers had left at the end of that season, by locals with little skill, plenty of motivation and even less to lose, and the result was probably his biggest success that decade.  
  
It was the morning after, emerging from sleep to remind himself just how much he hadn’t missed hangovers at _all_ , that the thought suddenly struck him: even if Ky hadn’t been pulled back to his old time all those years ago, he’d have been long dead. Sol would’ve found himself celebrating the date alone no matter what, and he couldn’t even bring himself to care. Even if he did meet Ky again, Sol wasn’t the man he’d fallen for – hadn’t been for years. Didn’t even regret that much, now. If he met Frederick today he’d probably punch him in the face.  
  
It was an attitude that did a lot to get him through the next few decades without going any more insane, so it had that much going for it. He still knew, objectively, there was reason to believe he’d see Ky in some form at some stage to come, but he’d long since given up really believing it. So when, a month after he’d let that old Swiss geezer talk him into joining an army even more old-fashioned than _he_ was, he found himself being introduced to their youngest and most promising new officer, a hundred and fifty years (not) picturing that moment did him no good at _all_.  
  
Needless to say, he didn’t make much of a first impression.  
  
It was almost funny, how even now he’d found Ky again at last, the curse of Things Sol Got Completely The Wrong Idea About wasn’t done with him, because even though Ky couldn’t have been past his early twenties when he was thrown back through time, and even though Frederick had gathered Ky had known ‘Sol’ for a several years at least, he’d always taken it for granted that ‘we met in the army’ could be safely taken to apply Ky would at least be _legal_ before Sol ever got to know him. Probably someone up there was finding it completely hilarious; it would explain a lot about his life.  
  
The joke wasn’t over there either, because after all those years bemoaning how much _he’d_ changed, the Ky the world had merrily delivered him was just about unrecognisable. When most boys that age would have been content with having an ordinary teenaged rebellion, Ky had missed by a couple of letters and had some kind of teenaged revelation instead, starting with what passed as Catholicism in that century, and veering sharply off into territory where Gears were not merely monsters but the ultimate symbol of every unforgivable atrocity ever committed by _or_ against mankind, and where it was his personal sworn duty to dedicate every waking moment to engineering their defeat. Sol had lived through nearly a hundred years of war he’d played a part in starting, and even he thought that was a bit much. There were no grey areas in Ky’s world, everything was black or white, mandatory or unforgivable. The idea of _anyone_ left in a world this broken still putting absolute faith in the guidance of a benevolent god made Sol nauseous; the idea it was _Ky_ was unbearable.  
  
The kid was a fanatic, and the army was letting him climb his way up the ranks like there was no peak. As far as Sol could tell, the only reason he hadn’t yet taken himself and all his army to kingdom come was because he still fought like a demon – including the same natural magical aptitude that had dazzled Frederick on their last meeting, and because was probably the best natural born leader Sol had ever heard of – and that was where the whole damn thing got seriously weird.  
  
Fanatics _weren’t_ capable of being good leaders; they gave good speeches, but they were too caught up in their own little worlds to be trusted to make decisions. Ky weighed every controversial decision three times, learned from his mistakes, let every officer under his command have his say, and smacked down bad suggestions with such grace and reason that people _thanked_ him for doing it. Never had Sol seen anyone with a clearer understanding of what his men could and couldn’t be expected to do, who could better balance boundless compassion for their welfare with the necessity of sending whole platoons on missions from which none might return. To him, faith in a benevolent god was the reason to keep fighting, _never_ the reason to assume victory was guaranteed to him by right. By the time he was fifteen an ordinary day was one where he spent the morning studying battlefield layouts and discussing tactics with his officers from first light, the afternoon leading his troops into the battlefield with a deadly fire in his eyes that left piles of the enemy in his wake, the evening refusing to rest until he was personally guaranteed every last one of the wounded had the best possible care, and the night filling out paperwork until nearly dawn. God knew when the kid ever _slept_.  
  
The reason Ky was so certain it was his destiny to lead the army to victory... might just have been because it _was._  
  
Sol had thought he’d gotten to know Ky pretty well when they’d met, all those lifetimes ago. Turned out he hadn’t known a single fucking _thing_. If he'd been the kind to believe higher powers, he might even have wondered whether the whole point of the last hundred and fifty years had been to show him just how lucky he was – how rare a creature he'd fallen for – because all that time on earth, all those people he'd met, and he'd never met another person who could hold a candle to Ky. Hadn't even believed someone like Ky was possible, until now.  
  
Not least because on top of all that virtue, he still managed to be an insufferable, judgemental, overly idealistic little brat with a martyr complex that would take him to an early grave if Sol didn't get in the way once in every other month, and no-one else around him even _saw_ it. Not least because no matter if the sun shone out of his arse, this still wasn’t _his_ Ky – _Frederick’s_ Ky – and he made Sol miss that Ky more than he’d missed him in over a hundred years, and not least because there were days when the urge to tumble him into the nearest bed became unbearable.  
  
It only made matters worse that Ky had had to go and develop a crush on him, practically from the first day they met. He could protest about Sol all he liked, rail away against this uncouth, disciplinary nightmare and it didn’t make one shred of difference that you couldn’t chalk down to denial: there was no-one who fascinated him more, and no-one who’s good opinion meant more to him. Sol could almost hear the kid’s heart rate pick up every time he so much as smiled in Ky’s direction. It was almost more than one man could take.  
  
Because Sol was still equal parts in love with who Ky was now and who he was going to be, and letting himself mix those up would spell disaster. It would be all too easy to get so caught up in the memory of who he was _going_ to be that he slipped up and did something he couldn't take back – the kid was so damn young and Sol had his standards, and if Sol said one word to him about it – did one thing to change the future – he probably never _would_ be that Ky, and after getting this far, that wasn't a chance Sol was willing to take.  
  
If Sol had thought it was unpleasant waiting through the century he not knowing when or even if he'd ever see Ky again, it had nothing on this. It was no wonder the poor man had been so confused about where he stood with the 'friend' he'd described to Frederick (or would describe, a few years ahead in his own timeline). The only way Sol managed at all was by keeping his distance, by pushing Ky away the moment he threatened to get too close – making trouble if he had to, and the result sent more mixed messages than anyone deserved to deal with. Even more because he was pretty sure the kid wasn't fooled, he knew Sol liked him under it all, and couldn't understand why he kept pushing him away.  
  
Eventually even that wasn't enough – _something_ was bound to give, and the day Sol finally snapped he snapped badly. They'd been sparring, a high risk activity at the best of times; emotions were high – they were both angry and frustrated, Sol hardly even remembered what the argument had been afterwards, or how they'd resolved it, except that suddenly the fight was over and he had Ky pinned to the floor underneath him, panting hard but hardly struggling, and it was all just too much to take.  
  
If Ky had offered even one word of protest that would have been all Sol needed to stop himself before he went too far, but that word never came. He shook in Sol's arms, arousal and fear in equal measures, moaned and called Sol's name, but he never once complained. Even if it was just teenage hormones, he was as desperate for this as Sol was.  
  
The afterglow lasted less than a five minutes before Sol felt more disgusted with himself than he'd ever been before.  
  
If there was _anything_ that could have proven to him how far this Ky was from being what Sol needed him to be, he'd just gone and grabbed it by the head. Frederick's Ky had been inexperienced, but he'd been a grown man, comfortable with his desires and never passive, not even on their first time. The one Sol had just taken advantage of was hardly more than a scared kid who'd hardly even dared meet his eyes; like what scared him most was that if he dared acknowledge what they were doing, they wouldn't be. He hadn't been far wrong.  
  
The worst part was trying to find a way to let the poor kid down gently afterwards. It must have been hard enough that he'd been forced to admit to his attraction for a man he'd always professed to despise, but to be rejected under the flimsiest excuse – no-one deserved that. Sol hardly even remembered what excuse he'd made said – something suitably pathetic about it being 'not a good idea' – what stayed with him was the look in the boy's eyes, the crushing disappointment, denied maybe the one and only selfish desire he'd ever let himself have.  
  
Now he was the biggest arse in the world in addition to being disgusted with himself, and even that didn't cover the fact he'd gone and done exactly what he'd promised himself he wouldn't do ever since Ky came back into his life: he'd _changed_ something. _His_ Ky had been very specific that he and Sol had never been involved, physically or romantically, and Sol was pretty sure he hadn't meant 'except this one time back in the army when he jumped me after a sparring match'. Maybe that didn't matter, maybe Ky would still get thrown back through time on schedule and wouldn't be so very different when (if) he made it back, but it would still _change_ things, and even a small change to events so long before the day could theoretically be enough to change everything. What was the alternative, to suggest Ky had spent the intervening years repressing something this big?  
  
The real alternative happened to be something Sol could never have seen coming: the aftermath of the Battle of Rome.  
  
A mere handful of days passed between the Incident and the battle (tense, horrible days they spent arguing and snapping at each other about nothing at all), and Sol never did find out just what went down at the end of it. Whether it was trauma or exhaustion or a blow to the head, or whether that I-no bitch had been involved (his personal favourite theory), Ky came home with holes in his memory that he never recovered from. Mostly it was trivial stuff – recent events, nothing more than a couple of weeks ago, but he had no recollection whatsoever of meeting I-no (suspect number one), and the tension between them ever since the incident was inexplicably gone. Sol lasted two more days before the suspense got the better of him and he went as far as actually mentioning this incident to Ky – obliquely, of course, but in context there was no way the kid could've mistaken what he was talking about. Ky looked at him like he'd gone insane and asked him what on earth he was on about.  
  
So that was that. Apparently he owed I-no a favour, damn her. The future, it seemed, was more robust than he'd given it credit for, but he'd much rather get through the rest of the years he had left without forcing the world to give Ky brain damage again to cover for his fuck-ups.  
  
It was only a few months after that that Sol finally decided he'd had it. If having sex with Ky couldn't screw up the timeline, then nothing could – including the kid's constant attempts to martyr himself for his cause, so why the fuck was Sol torturing himself by sticking around like this? He was commander of the whole damn army by that stage, and if he wasn't old enough to manage without Sol around he never would be. Sol had a war to win, and he was only crippling himself by making himself play by the Order's rules.  
  
Stealing the Fuuenken didn't solve all his problems in one go, but it came pretty close. It may have been a bit far to go just to drive a wedge between him and Ky, but it also gave him exactly the weapon he needed if he was going after Justice, and he never realised how much he'd missed it until it was back in his hands.  
  
It didn't make the job easy, but it got it done.  
  
And then at last the war was over. The waiting wasn't.  
  
He did a pretty good job of avoiding Ky over the years that followed, and if that was cowardly, he didn't even care anymore. Running into him again at the tournament wasn't something he'd planned on, but at least he got to see the boy – the _man_ now, though he didn't dare let himself think that too hard – was doing alright now the war he'd dedicated his life to winning was won. The bigger surprise was meeting Axl Low – an Axl Low who didn't recognise him any more than Ky had, and had no idea why this weirdo was so pleased to see him. Now Sol _knew_ they were getting close.  
  
Things seemed oddly more relaxed between him and Ky after that, on the odd occasions they ran into each other. Sol wasn't sure exactly what that meant, except that Ky was growing up at last. He was becoming more like Frederick's Ky every time Sol saw him – he'd even gotten over his paranoid insistence on the evil of Gears, and Sol hadn't had anything to do with it.  
  
Keeping his distance was harder than ever before. Patience had never been one of his virtues.  
  
The best day of his whole damn life was the day Axl came bursting in through the door of the bar he was sitting in, eager to find out if Ky had made it back yet. He hadn't – Axl had, in fact, already contacted the IPF and found out only that he was missing and no-one knew where he was, and had subsequently gone looking for Sol just in case he and Ky had wanted some 'alone time' together and that was why he hadn't shown up to work. Sol had to disappoint him, but on the inside he wasn't disappointed at all. If Axl was back and he had the date for that, he knew exactly how far behind Ky was going to be.  
  
He'd spent a long time thinking he was too jaded to enjoy this as much as he would have a hundred years ago, but he was grinning from ear to ear when he left the bar that day.  
  
There was still plenty he wasn't certain about – his calculations could've been off, he didn't know _how_ Ky was going to react, he wasn't even sure how he was going to react after all this time. The trouble with _knowing_ with still more than twenty-four hours left to go was that there was going to be no plausible deniability about how he was going to handle seeing Ky again: either he went out now and bought _supplies_ in bulk, or he didn't.  
  
Sol did. And then he parked himself outside Ky's house, and waited.  
  
He couldn't honestly say it'd been worth the wait – but the wait would have happened either way, and now that Justice was dead and the war was over and he was _finally here,_ it didn't seem so bad that he'd had something to look forward to. He was still immortal and Ky wasn't, but he finally had their second chance together, and he wasn't going to waste a minute.


End file.
